finally

I recently got the opportunity to just sit and write. While hopping between classrooms, experiencing different teaching strategies and personalities during my cooperating teacher's planning period, I stopped in on a creative writing course.

Now that I think about it, this teacher demonstrated several of Newkirk's ideas (yes, those have still been reverberating in my mind). He integrated the reading of poetry with the writing of it as well as gave the students, and myself, the time to write. Also, he didn't limit the students but he did give them a starting point: the first line of a poem of the students' choice. He told them just to write, not to critisize what spilled onto the page or erase every other word, but to let the images unfold on their own accord. Go with it. In this manner, he encouraged the lying down of arms with the inner-dialogue every writer typically battles with. Write now, revise later. I felt a weight lift off myself, as well. Just write.

I started with the first line of a Langston Hughes poem and kept my hand moving. What I ended up with surprised me, and so here it is, the product of a free write, unrevised, raw:

I, too, sing America
in my own way
my own time like
that kid on the tricycle
rides around, young
and red
red hair red freckles
yet

they did not originate
there, here
they immigrated like on
his arm to
his shoulder

they were always there
the freckles
but people,
people could not see them

until the sun
shone so bright so
cyclical in the
blue sky, white clouds
like his eyes bright
as round
and the wheels
round
and the sun hurt
his eyes

he blinked those
long eyelashes blonde
from the sun

people used to stop him
a child
and tell him how beautiful
how magnificant those
eyes
those
eyelashes


The poem is not finished, but it's a start.